


Episode 2:  Estancia, New Mexico

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Series: The Canyon's Arms Are All We Know [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 06:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18614848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: Astra makes her ungraceful entrance





	Episode 2:  Estancia, New Mexico

The stars were spinning, end over end.

Astra’s escape from the Fort had not gone entirely to plan. She had rounded up a large enough group for rebellion, overthrowing the guards and clearing out the entire cell block that she and her husband had been housed in. However, they found their attempts to gain command of the bridge unsuccessful, and had had to turn to their backup plan when things went sideways: the Fort had escape pods, as any large unmoored structure did in space. Twenty-six single-occupant pods launched in all. Astra, being the best pilot, had seen all of the others get blown out of the sky, including her husband’s.

Hers had nearly gone the same way, but she’d managed to get out of range, despite taking damage. She’d pointed her guidance systems at Earth, the nearest habitable planet, and hoped she would hit it.

With the limited tools available to her, she’d cloaked the pod to avoid detection as she entered the atmosphere. The heat of her impossible friction on entry was blistering. She had not been prepared for the raw screaming sound of air, thick as water, rushing past the outside of the pod. She had not been prepared for the stars, spinning, end over end.

She was about to crash in the middle of what looked like a desert. There were signs of civilization nearby, but not very much. This was a relief, though not much of one.

The craft shuddered and the dark bulk of the earth grew large in her front viewer. She prayed something, something wordless and vague, and then the impact came, and there was only black for some time.

 

 

****

 

 

She came to, blinked, looked around. She had not been unconscious long, she thought, slowly noticing that she had landed on her back, so to speak, facing up. The stars were in more or less the same position that they had been just before she’d crashed. Her neck hurt. Her arm hurt worse. She muttered some curses and then after using her uninjured arm to fiddle with the catch for a few excruciating minutes, she kicked open the pod’s exit hatch and wriggled and tossed around until she could get upright and bail out.

She looked quickly at the pod’s interior. She spotted a medkit and a small aural insert for translation, and grabbed them both. Then she looked at the instrument panel, which was still flickering on and off. She heaved a sigh, put the aural insert into the medkit and tossed that out of the pod, and then made the awkward, painful climb out of it with one broken arm.

She could see an unlit thoroughfare not too far from where she had crashed. It was empty now, but roads existed for reasons and it meant that someone would be along soon. Observing the large rut the pod had left in the sand behind it as it dragged along the desert floor, she reasoned that her crash probably would have gotten someone’s attention. Since the computer was even partly functional, and there was nowhere for her to put the pod, she set the fuel cells to overload, and made her way toward the large, hulking rock formations about a hundred yards away.

She could see far away down the thoroughfare, a few groups of lights. As she suspected, she had attracted attention. She moved as quickly as she could through the darkness, hearing the beeping from the pod’s manifold increasing in speed as she moved. She hoped it would blow before the humans arrived; she didn’t want anyone hurt, she just couldn’t risk having her technology in the hands of a culture this primitive.

She didn’t look back at the pod as it blew, she just continued breaking for those large rocks, hoping that they would offer her someplace to wait for the humans to leave the area. The heat wasn’t quite close enough to singe her hair, but she saw her shadow, long and black, in the bright corona of blue that the explosion cast on the sand, and then the softer blue as the flames licked their way through what remained of the craft.

She found an overhang, as she had hoped, wedged between two of the bigger rocks, and she was able to huddle in there and watch the humans come.First there came two white vehicles with red and blue lights on top. Then a little while later came a large red vehicle which came and sprayed various things on the pod until the flames went out. Then came some shiny black vehicles with windows that were blacked out. Some men in black suits got out of them and conversed with the men from the first two vehicles. Yellow tape went up around the pod’s crash site.

She supposed she was going to be here for a little while. 

In the medkit, she found a splint for her arm and, fortunately, a can of biogel. That would help the bone mend faster. She could feel with her fingers that it was only a hairline fracture, not something that she would have to re-set, so she applied the biogel and dressed the wound, and put it in the splint without the aid of any painkillers. She might have to move quickly and didn’t feel it was worth the risk of impairing her judgment or reflexes. Even in the cold of the desert night, sweat broke on her forehead as she dealt with the injured bones.

But pain wasn’t particularly new to her. This wasn’t even the worst pain she’d felt recently.

When she was finished, she leaned back against the unyielding rock and closed her eyes for a few minutes, breathing deeply. The air smelled … different. Not like the stale, heavily processed air of the Fort, and not like the distinct smells of Krypton, not even what had remained of its wilds and open spaces. She breathed deep. It was fresh at least.It was cold, though, and she spent the next hours shivering, mildly nauseous and in constant low-level pain.

She sat huddled under the overhang, watching the humans’ vehicles come and go, onward into the morning, by which time another kind of vehicle came, carrying a large flat bed in the rear of it. The wreck of the pod still smoked, but with no more fire, men and machines loaded onto the flat bed, and it rolled away down the thoroughfare, leaving the sharp smell of burnt polymers in its wake. She had no idea where they were taking it, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing in it for them to discover now.

 

 

****

 

 

Astra was aware of the generally accepted folktales about worlds with yellow suns, how they were supposed to give those who hailed from star systems like Krypton’s a kind of godlike power, strength and invulnerability. However, seven hours into her stay on Earth, she had not felt any different, her arm was still broken, and she wondered whether folk tales were all they were.

Watching from the rocks, she saw the humans cordoning off the area as the sun continued to rise. She could see a few gawkers come and go, but mostly the traffic on the thoroughfare rolled by without much disruption. A few slowed down to look at what was going on, but by this point, there wasn’t much to see except some discolored sand and a largish rut in the ground.

If they had any intelligence at all, they were probably going to begin searching the area to look for survivors. She certainly was that, she thought with wry amusement. Her arm wasn’t in very good condition; under ideal circumstances, she wouldn’t want to walk around just yet. But these were not ideal circumstances.

She got up, slung the medkit over her shoulder, and surveyed the landscape in daylight. The road stretched in two directions, seemingly into infinity. The landscape was a dusty red, and odd pyramids of rock seemed to rise up here and there across the seemingly endless expanse, striated in shades of gold, red, and brown. They almost looked as if they’d been painted by some great invisible hand. She had always been under the impression that this was a green world. Perhaps it was not the same everywhere.

She had multiple problems now: her clothing would no doubt call attention to her, which she did not want. She had no currency of any kind with which to procure a replacement. And she had not come in a pod designed for long-distance travel, which meant it had lacked a comprehensive pre-programmed language database which might have included any of Earth’s languages.

She popped the insert into her ear. It would need to monitor about two to three hours of broadcast in order to build its translation database. It was a handy item for use when one found themselves in a strange place unexpectedly. Once it had built its database, she would be able to listen to what was going on in the airwaves. Meanwhile, she would stay off the main roads, and move in the direction of what looked like civilization. Not the she intended to interact with it exactly; she would merely nibble at the edges of it, availing herself of what she needed to survive until she could work out what to do next.

The yellow sun was strange and bright; the largeness of the turquoise sky inspired awe. In its own way, it was beautiful here, if not what she had been led to expect. So she stayed off the road, moving from rock formation to rock formation, until the heat grew to such an extent that she could no longer tolerate it. She tore off the prison top, made of thick, stretchy black fabric, and stuffed into the medkit bag, so that she was only in her sleeveless prison undershirt. She let the yellow sun beat down on her shoulders and arms. She was sweating now, most annoyingly inside of the splint. She could feel the fizzing of the biogel doing its work, so she knew she’d be able to remove it in a day or so, but right now, that seemed like an eternity.

 

 

*****

 

It took two and a half hours for the broadcasts in her ear to stop being babble and start becoming something she could understand.

_“…roads leading out of Santa Fe are blocked right now by a five car pile-up started by the back of a trailer truck full of watermelons breaking open and releasing its contents out onto the street.I’ll tell you, Jim, I like free watermelon but that’s not how I’d like to get them, am I right?”_

She frowned and adjusted the signal.

_“…and the President says that if Congress continues to fight him on building the wall along the southern border, that he’s going to escalate the matter to the Supreme Court. Just how he intends to pursue this course of action is unclear at this time.Meanwhile, in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced that….”_

She sighed. Local politics. She adjusted the signal again.

_“…because Tecate equals taste. Tecate equals tradition. Tecate is for the people who know. If you drink beer, your beer should be a…”_

Advertising, she supposed. The sound of that was nearly universal. She adjusted the signal again. Music, a dry, dusty, wistful kind of music came flooding into her head.

 _“Loneliness is universal,”_ a soft voice was saying over the music. _“And it shouldn’t be. We all need each other. We all need someone. I don’t think we should be afraid of that.”_

She broke for a while under another rock overhang. A little further up, she could see a small installation of some kind. A fueling station, perhaps? She desperately needed water. Its shape seemed to shimmer through the rising waves of heat coming off the blacktopped road. So that would be her first destination.

 

 

******

 

 

The fueling station, for that was what it clearly was when she drew nearer, had a sign out front that Astra couldn’t read, and had a couple of large vehicles parked at the stations, drawing fuel, it appeared. She stood at the edge of the cement lot and watched the activity for a few minutes before divining that there was a water closet around the side.This was good, because her need for water was becoming more and more urgent. She’d been sweating so much she hadn’t needed to urinate since she’d landed.

When she went to that door, though, she found it locked. A slight wave of nausea went through her.She walked into the glass-walled building, and looked around dizzily. The cool air blasted her body as soon as she entered, and it soothed her enormously. 

She was dizzy. She didn’t know how to ask for what she needed.

The elderly woman behind the counter looked at her with a frown of concern. “You okay, honey? You don’t look so good.”

Astra shook her head.

The woman looked her over once, and after taking in the sleeveless top, the tight black pants and boots, and the backpack, she asked, “You a rock climber?”

Astra didn’t know what to say, so she nodded.

The woman came out from behind the counter and approached her. “You weren’t out there alone, were you?”

Astra nodded. The floor seemed soft underneath her feet.

“Here,” the woman was saying, “you’d better sit…”

The world went black. Astra didn’t know what was happening. Her eyes closed in spite of her mind’s protestations.

 

 

******

 

 

She woke up with pale fluorescent lights bearing down on her. Dimly, she could hear the woman in quiet conversation with a man. The insert was still translating for her.

The man spoke first. “Think she’s an illegal?”

The woman snorted. “Does she look like a Mexican to you?”

An awkward pause. “I guess not. But where’d she come from?”

“I don’t know.”

She felt a cool hand on her cheek, tapping it gently. “Hey, honey, you alright?”

She took a moment to focus. She was slumped in a chair in what appeared to be a back office of the station. It was a small cramped room with no windows. She was grateful to be out of the sun. She looked at the woman, who was looking at her with concern. The woman handed her a small plastic bottle of what looked like water. She sipped from it, and then when she confirmed that it was in fact water, she drank the entire thing down without stopping. She could not remember experiencing this kind of thirst before.

“Thank goodness,” the woman said, “I was just about getting ready to call an ambulance.”She peered at Astra. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

Astra thought. She tried to remember a name from the broadcast. What was it? “Angela.”

The woman made a little sound that had no translation. “Where you from?”

Astra thought. She couldn’t say Krypton, obviously. What was the name in the broadcast? “Germany.”

The woman looked the man triumphantly. “Told you she wasn’t Mexican. There was a bus that come through here an hour or so ago, a tour group. Reckon that might have been your group?”

Astra nodded. The words were translating in her earpiece, but still, she didn’t really understand them.

“Well, where were they headed? If Earl here is going in the right direction, maybe he can drop you?”

She thought again. “Santa Fe,” she said after a moment.

The woman glanced at Earl. “What do you say, Earl? You able to drop her in Santa Fe?”

He nodded. “Yeah, that’ll work fine.”

Astra didn’t like the way Earl was looking at her. She wasn’t sure the woman noticed it. He stood there in his lightweight, checkered shirt and a cap with the bill pulled down to shade his face in a way she didn’t care for.

“Say,” the woman added as she inspected Astra’s face, “you’re burned up pretty good. You must’ve been walking out there for hours before you found us.” She looked around, and then opened a drawer and went digging through it for a moment. She produced a few items: a tube of something, and a large wooden block with a small metal key attached. She handed them both to Astra.

“Now, bathroom’s around the back, that there’s the key for the padlock on the door.”She noticed Astra looking quizzically at the large wooden block attached to it. “That’s to discourage people running off with it. Bet they don’t need to do nonsense like that in Germany, do they.”

Astra shook her head.

“Anyhow, that’s some burn cream. You look like you could use it. Go ahead and wash your face, put some of that on, and get yourself together while Earl gets fueled up.”

Astra wished the insert had a function for translation going the other way. All it had was a frustratingly simplistic “suggested response function.” She tapped it once and it suggested “thank you,” which she dutifully repeated. The words felt awkward in her mouth, but the woman didn’t seem bothered. Astra took the tube to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The woman hadn’t been wrong; her shoulders, her chest and her cheeks and chin were bright red and inflamed. The violence of the yellow sun without the gifts that were supposed to come with it.

She applied some biogel from the medkit, and then put the thick white cream from the tube on top of it to conceal the color and texture of the biogel.

Then she strode back to the shop, returned the items to the woman, and climbed into Earl’s truck.

Earl was a stout man with facial hair and a protruding gut, who listened to raucous music on the radio and ate dried meat strips out of a plastic bag. Jerky, he called it.

Even with only one good arm, Astra didn’t have a very hard time subduing him when he attempted to help himself to her body in exchange for transporting her.And so, half an hour after leaving the fuel station, Earl was unconscious in his truck, which was precariously half-overturned on the side of the highway leading into Santa Fe. Astra was trudging down the highway, listening again to the approach of the wailing klaxons as the humans came to investigate the damage which she, once again, had no intention of being anywhere near.

This time, she was wearing a lightweight checkered shirt and a cap with the bill pulled down to shade her face.She had a bottle of water and the plastic bag of jerky strips in her medkit bag.  _Ah_ , she thought with unusual black humor, _things have improved already_.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> This story is presented as installments in a series, so if you’re enjoying it, please subscribe to my profile or to the series itself.
> 
> Thanks!


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